On January 20th, 2017, Sam Messer launched a serial animation project titled Years of the Cock. A fantastic mashup of mixed media animation, the work brings Messer’s visionary painting and drawing practice into dialog with political cartoon, flicker film, and contemporary news media vernaculars. Messer’s work demonstrates deep and sustained investigation of the relationships between language and image. On the occasion of the president’s inaugural first fifty days in office, Johannes DeYoung talks with Messer about the evolution of the work.

Johannes DeYoung, Founding Editor, Lookie-Lookie

Johannes DeYoung: How did you come to the rooster? It's such a loaded image.

Sam Messer: This is the year of the cock, in the zodiac. It’s a fact. I started on Inauguration Day and made a new animation every day after that. I wanted to call the project Year of the Cock, but the domain was taken and we’re probably stuck with this president for more than a year. The animations were fast in the beginning, but I’m slowing them down now.

JD: You're slowing them down?

SM: Well, I had been making them without realizing that Instagram cut them off at a minute. I didn’t really watch them once I posted them, then one day I did and I kept thinking I was doing something wrong. So, I posted one five times in a row and people started asking, why do you keep posting this? That’s when I started making them all to be a minute. But I realize some of them are better longer, so now I’m making two different versions. I make one that lasts a minute, then I make a director’s cut.

JD: And that’s the video that goes on the website?

SM: That’s the one I put on the website. You know, some of them are still a minute-long, but some of them need to be longer — there was one from the other day that I really liked, but it was too fast, so I slowed it down, and I also sang on it.

JD: I like your singing.

SM: It’s fun. I also learned that it prevents the videos from getting pulled off the internet.

JD: They don’t get pulled off the internet because they're strange. Maybe Vimeo doesn’t care about your singing? I especially like the way one song blends into the next. They have great energy.

There’s a break in conversation here. All we hear is the sound of Sam’s voice singing Wimoweh from The Tokens’ classic, The Lion Sleeps Tonight.

SM: I’m going to MSNBC on Friday to draw.

JD: How did that happen, did you get an invitation?

SM: Yes.

JD: Based on this work?

SM: Well, I’ve become friends with Ali Velshi. He told me he’s anchoring then, so I asked him if I could come draw. I have to sign something to say I won’t post anything on social media or take photographs, but I’m fairly used to that from being on movie sets.

JD: How will that affect the drawings for animation?

SM: Well, I think I can use those. There’s not a problem with that. I don’t even know if they will be used for this project — I’ll probably only use one or two. They’re on screen so briefly, I could have drawn the frames watching the news at home for all anyone knows.

JD: Is that how you make most of the work?

SM: Yes, each animation takes a few hours. I usually make them at night while I’m watching the news.

We listen to Johnny Cash and an image of Mel Brooks flashes on the screen.

SM: You know, Mel Brooks is so present. Let’s face it, Blazing Saddles could be right now. The piece I’m making today is based on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

JD: Language is such an important part of the work. What’s your experience working around journalists? Are they motivated or demoralized by the current political state?

SM: Motivated.

JD: When you started, you were making new animations every day, but in the most recent videos you account for multiple days in one video. It seems like accounting for multiple days gives you more room to stretch — more material to work with — not that you really lack material…

SM: It’s not really that, but what happened was my computer broke and I needed a way to address the sound for a few days when I didn’t have a computer. I want to get thru the first hundred days of Trump’s presidency and then I might rethink the timespan of each video.

JD: So, instead of accounting for a single day, or a couple days, a single video might account for a week, or a month?

SM: I want to string the videos together. Like Jim Jarmusch in Stranger Than Paradise, a series of vignettes.

JD: How did you come to the image of Mitch McConnell as a sloth?

SM: Well it seemed obvious to me for two reasons. First of all, he looks like a sloth, but mainly he is one. When Obama first came into office, the first thing McConnell said was, we’ll do nothing — and that’s exactly what the party did. Their job was to actually stop any movement, and that’s what sloths do — they sit in a tree and do nothing. They can live their whole lives in the tree. They don’t even get down to shit; they do it from the tree, it falls below them, organisms in the shit hatch, and butterflies fly up to live in their fur. That’s just like what they’ve done in the Senate and Congress. They’ve just been sitting there with themselves waiting until they can slide down the tree again.

JD: It’s an ecosystem.

SM: Of course. They have their own eco-system, they have their own health care — they have everything. They don’t need to do anything. So when I wanted to do something, it just seemed like the obvious image to me. I always remembered that about sloths, plus they just look amazing. But the fact that they just don’t move — more than even a turtle — I could have used a turtle, but I think turtles are too high on the scale of dignity.

Sam Messer's Years of the Cock project can be found at http://www.yearsofthecock.com. His work is also found in public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Yale University Art Gallery. He has received numerous awards including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant, the Engelhard Award, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is Associate Dean and professor at the Yale School of Art. He is represented by Nielsen Gallery, Boston, and Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles.